HASTY LEGISLATION.

Fair Play, Volume I, Issue 14, 3 February 1894, Page 13

HASTY LEGISLATION.

When the new Parliament meets it is to be hoped that it may pass as few new Acts as possible. We are one of the most law-ridden nations under the sun, and fully half the Acts are not wanted, and when passed are virtually a dead letter. Of the remaining half only too many are so stupidly conceived and so badly drafted that it would be better had they never been passed at all, Even the lawyers can’t understand them, and to. the ordinary public they are as intelligible as a Chinese history book to a first standard child. There' are so many holes and

corners in them that the lawbreakers can generally manage to slip through these very convenient openings, and so escape the consequences of thoir misdoings, and the. cost of litigation under these badly drawn enactments is almost ruinious to those of the public who are foolish enough to commence aotion under them. Instances ore constantly cropping up where it is found that certain olauses of some of the hastily passed' laws are so obsoure in their meaning that neither counsel nor judges can come to any satisfactory conclusion as to their meaning, the latest case of this sort of thing haying occurred at Dunedin on Monday last in connection with the Contractors’ Workmen’s Lion Act. One solicitor engaged in the case declared that the Act was a perfeot disgrace to the draughtsman, aha the Magistrate who tried the case admitted he oould find no definition of the word “claim” in the Act. Consequently the action, which was brought by two workmen against a contractor who was said to have ab-* sconded, fell through.. Now this sort of thing is neither creditable to the Minister who introduced the Bill nor to the Parliament which passod it. Mr. Beeves is a lawyer himself, but he cannot have put his legal knowledge to much good purpose, when he could introduce legislation which is so fauliy, and serious blame is also attachable to tho late Parliament for passing such a crude and unworkable measure. The fact of the matter is that the majority of the measures introduced in the House now-a-days aro drawn up so hastily and carelessly, are discussed in such a perfunctory manner and passed with so much indifference and lack of proper investigation into their meaning, that they cannot fail, when placed on the Statute Book of tho colony, to be unworkable and absolutely pernicious in there effeot. The late Parliament scamped its work most shamefully. Measures were discussed, not on their merits, but from a purely party point of view, and were rushed through with a precipitation which was positively indecent. This state of things will not, we trust, have to be reported of the new Parliament. We hope that in the new House there will not be such reckless passing of illconceived, badly drawn, and meagrely comprehensible measures as was the case in the last Parliament, and we hope too that Ministers will see that the Bills they introduce are so drafted that they will, if passed, be found to be intelligible and workable. These two adjectives evidently cannot very properly be applied to many of the Acts of the last two or three sessions. At present it would seem that only too many of the measures on the Statute Book exist more for the benefit of the lawyers than for that of the public. This should not be, and we look to the new Parliament to do its work better.